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Monthly Archives: September 2013

Like for many others, Star Wars was a life-changing event for me as a kid (even though I was only 5 years old). The movie is the reason why today I am working in this film business field. Also is one of the reasons why I love drawing so much, even though I was drawing way before I saw the film. It is hard to communicate how different Star Wars was from everything. I saw it 7 times at the theatre at that time and I remember asking my father to show me more movies like that. His answer was clear: there are no more movies like this. I guess that explains all.

Anyway, I loved all about Star Wars and of course I loved the spaceships. I had no idea about design or art or anything at the time, but I could not stop drawing them. They seemed to work and they were so fun to draw. With the “making of” books available at the time you could see a lot of concept art and that was like trying to put out a fire with gasoline. I was fascinated by Joe Johnston and Ralph McQuarrie designs, by the ILM workshops pictures, the model building, Everything was just what my little brain needed.

And here we are, like 35 years later and I am still buying Star Wars related books, toys and whatever. I am fanboy. Add to this that I have been a storyboard artist for a long time, starting in 1995, and I have done work for quite a lot of films and commercials and even taught some classes about it. And it all started with Star Wars.

After this pretty unoriginal introduction, let´s talk about the book in question here: Star Wars Storyboards, The Prequel Trilogy. The title says it all: a selection of storyboards of the prequels. I will say with no shame I love the 3 films, so I won´t go into useless debates about which movies are better or if they are so good or so bad or whatever.

Anyway, the book.

This is a thick hardcover book, 350 pages full of storyboards. Storyboards are, like everybody knows, sequential illustrations that explains visually the content of a given shot that the director wants to shoot. More or less. If you want to call it ” a comic book of the movie done before is shot” that would work too. In this book you can see this clearly.

The boards found here are all of excellent quality, big in size, and we can see also lots of different styles though all work perfectly as storyboards: they explain the action, convey camera and character movements clearly and give a sense of framing, scope and mood. Some are more detailed than others, but being storyboards the important thing is to transmit the directors ideas, not to create amazing works of art to display on museums. However, the thing is that most of the boards here are excellent on their own right. Authors, among others are: Ed Natividad, Iain McCaig, Benton Jew, Rodolfo Damaggio and more.